Quite a long time since my last post. Crazy how a couple years can pass you by super fast. I hope to amp up my posts again the next several months.
In the meantime, I'd like to engage in some selfish, self-promotion. A good colleague of mine, Weber State University archaeologist
Kristin De Lucia, and I have just published a book on the anthropology and archaeology of surplus.
The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life
edited by Christopher T. Morehart and Kristin De Lucia
"The concept of surplus captures the politics of production and also
conveys the active material means by which people develop the strategies
to navigate everyday life. Surplus: The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life
examines how surpluses affected ancient economies, governments, and
households in civilizations across Mesoamerica, the Southwest United
States, the Andes, Northern Europe, West Africa, Mesopotamia, and
eastern Asia.
A hallmark of archaeological research on sociopolitical complexity,
surplus is central to theories of political inequality and institutional
finance. This book investigates surplus as a macro-scalar process on
which states or other complex political formations depend and considers
how past people—differentially positioned based on age, class, gender,
ethnicity, role, and goal—produced, modified, and mobilized their social
and physical worlds.
Placing the concept of surplus at the forefront of archaeological
discussions on production, consumption, power, strategy, and change,
this volume reaches beyond conventional ways of thinking about top-down
or bottom-up models and offers a comparative framework to examine
surplus, generating new questions and methodologies to elucidate the
social and political economies of the past."
Contributors: Douglas J. Bolender, James A. Brown, Cathy L.
Costin, Kristin De Lucia, Timothy Earle, John E. Kelly, Heather M. L.
Miller, Christopher R. Moore, Christopher T. Morehart, Neil L. Norman,
Ann B. Stahl, Victor D. Thompson, T. L. Thurston, E. Christian Wells
“
This will be an influential volume for years to come.”
—Elliot Abrams, Ohio University
A review of the book
